Rubriq was created in 2012 as part of Research Square. We are a group of over 100 published postgraduates supporting a network of thousands of academic reviewers and editors dedicated to helping researchers succeed. We are not a publisher, but we partner with journals to help improve the speed and quality of the peer review process and partner with individual researchers to help them communicate their work so that they can focus on making discoveries.
Rubriq performs rigorous, double-blind peer review of manuscripts within two weeks over a wide variety of disciplines. Based on the topic and the techniques used in the research, our team of published PhDs matches manuscripts to reviewers with a published track record of expertise in these areas. These reviewers use the Rubriq Scorecard (read more below) to provide a thorough evaluation and commentary on all aspects of the manuscript. The reviews are then compiled into the Rubriq Report, which brings each of the reviews together to help authors and journal editors understand the strengths and weaknesses of each section and aspect of the paper in both quantitative and descriptive terms.
The Rubriq Report is a flexible evaluation tool for both researchers and journals. Authors can use the feedback from the reviewers to improve the manuscript or to decide where in the journal ecosystem to submit the work. Our Sound Research Stamp will give authors a clear idea if the work is likely to be accepted at a sound-science based journal. In addition, journal editors can also use the report to decide on the suitability of a manuscript for their journal.
Our reviewers are the same qualified peer reviewers who review for journals. They are active, publishing researchers with doctorate-level degrees or professorships. Of the reviewers currently in our network, over 80% are from the US, Canada, Europe and the UK, with over 90% of them being tenure-track professors, clinicians, and postdoctoral fellows. If we do not have three high-quality matches for your manuscript within our network already, then our team recruits reviewers from outside our network that meet these same high standards to evaluate the manuscript.
We developed the Rubriq Scorecard with academic reviewers and Editors-in-Chief of several journals to be a rigorous, complete tool for the evaluation of manuscripts. Reviewers use the Rubriq Scorecard to provide a thorough evaluation and commentary on all aspects of the manuscript, falling into several broad categories: the quality of the research, the quality of the presentation of the work, the novelty and interest of the manuscript, and the potential of the work for publication in a sound research journal.
At the heart of the scorecard is a set of items for each category designed to help calibrate reviewers around the key items essential to a paper following standard scientific methodology. For each item, the reviewer can select from a list of common deficiencies to identify the weaknesses of the paper before elaborating with specific comments and examples to aid the authors and journal editors in evaluating the manuscript. You can read more about how we developed this new peer review tool in our white paper.